In August 2009, the research team published Flash Cookies and Privacy, a paper that demonstrated that popular websites were using Flash cookies to track users.  Some advertisers has adopted this technology because it allowed persistent tracking, even where users had taken steps to avoid web profiling. This allowed sites to reinstantiate HTTP cookies deleted by a user, making tracking more resistant to users’ privacy-setting behaviors.

In this followup study, we reassess the flash cookies landscape and examine a new tracking vector, HTML5 local storage and cache cookies via eTags. [Read more…]